The Role of Bilingual Language Input in Children's Receptive and Productive Vocabulary Development

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the role of input quantity and quality in bilingual children’s receptive and productive vocabulary development in English and Dutch. In order to do so, information about children’s amount (quantity) and type (quality) of language input was obtained by collecting that on 18 children aged 2;6-3;9 attending English/Dutch bilingual day care via a parental questionnaire. Receptive and productive vocabulary in both languages was assessed with standardized vocabulary tests administered at the day care centres. The present study found both quantitative and qualitative child-external input factors to be significantly positively related to children’s receptive and productive vocabulary development. Once controlled for other input factors, current exposure at home/day care was significantly positively correlated with children’s vocabulary development. In addition, the study found that bilingual children who already received most of their input in one of their languages at home, did not require additional input in that language at day care to reach monolingual norms in that language, while children who received insufficient language input at home were dependent on the extra input at day care. This finding tends to show that there is a certain threshold above which additional input becomes superfluous, a finding suggested in previous literature (Thordardottir, 2011; Unsworth, in press).